Work

JADES: low surface brightness galaxies at 0.4 < z < 0.8 in GOODS-S

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: ABSTRACT Low surface brightness galaxies (LSBs) are an important class of galaxies that allow us to broaden our understanding of galaxy formation and test various cosmological models. We present a survey of LSBs at $0.4 \lt z_{\rm phot} \lt 0.8$ in the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-South (GOODS-S) field using JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) data. We model LSB surface brightness profiles, identifying those with $\bar{\mu }_{\rm eff} \gt 24$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$ in the F200W James Webb Space Telescope/Near-Infrared Camera (JWST/NIRCam) filter. We study the spatial distribution, number density, Sérsic profile parameters, and rest-frame colours of these LSBs. We compare the photometrically derived star formation histories, mass-weighted ages, and dust attenuations of these galaxies with a high surface brightness (HSB) sample at similar redshift and a lower redshift ($z_{\rm phot} \lt 0.4$) LSB sample, all of which have stellar masses $\lesssim 10^8 {\rm M}_{\odot }$. We find that all samples have low star formation (SFR$_{100} \lesssim 0.01 \: {\rm M}_{\odot } \: \mbox{yr}^{-1}$). The higher redshift LSBs and HSBs have similar star formation histories which show that the LSBs and HSBs possibly come from the same progenitors at $z \gtrsim 2$, though the histories are not well constrained for the LSB samples. The LSBs appear to have minimal dust, with most of our LSB samples showing $A_V \lt 1$ mag. JWST has pushed our understanding of LSBs beyond the local Universe.

Source: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stag202